The Managed Heart

The text highlights the concept of “feeling rules,” cultural guidelines dictating appropriate emotions in various situations, which significantly impact our emotional lives. The author explains that people become aware of these rules through self-assessments, others’ reactions, and societal sanctions when our emotions deviate from expectations. She emphasizes that feeling rules are most evident during emotional deviance, such as when individuals feel emotions that differ from societal expectations. These rules vary across social groups: Women, Protestants, and the middle class are more likely to suppress emotions than men, Catholics, and the lower class.

The author discusses how society communicate and enforces feeling rules both internally, through a “watchful chorus,” and externally, through direct or indirect reminders from others. She provides a detailed example of a bride feeling depressed and anxious during her wedding, illustrating the gap between actual and expected emotions. A psychiatrist might see this as psychological, while a sociologist views it as shaped by feeling rules associated with the wedding ritual. The text notes that these rules can change over time and across contexts; for example, attitudes toward weddings may shift in a society with rising divorce rates. Likewise, the author acknowledges pain avoidance and advantage-seeking as principles influencing emotion management within the context of feeling rules.

The book explores the concept of “misfitting feelings,” particularly during significant events like funerals, where expected emotions often clash with personal feelings. As examples, the text describes individuals experiencing inappropriate emotions at funerals, such as a woman feeling happy due to attention or a man feeling relief rather than grief.

Furthermore, the author explores managing emotions in long-term, deeply personal relationships, such as between parents and children, spouses, and close friends. These relationships demand continuous emotion work to maintain acceptable feelings amid inherent ambivalence. She notes that emotional conflicts within families highlight how differing interpretations of situations by parents and children can strain bonds. As examples, she cites a son struggling to reconcile his anger toward his father and a daughter feeling anger instead of sympathy toward her mother, who emotionally disrupted the family. These examples illustrate the tension between societal expectations and personal emotions.

Additionally, the author explores sibling and spousal struggles in managing feelings. A sibling might feel guilty for not loving a sister with an intellectual disability, while a spouse might struggle with societal expectations to love a partner despite personal experiences. Freud’s observation that a woman might suppress true feelings to maintain the ideal of married life underscores the emotional labor involved.

The text underscores the significant roles of social norms and experts in shaping emotional experiences, particularly during times of social change when individuals seek guidance on appropriate feelings: “Indeed, we are most likely to sense a feeling rule as a feeling rule, and deep acting as deep acting, not when we are strongly attached to a culture or a role but when we are moving from one culture or one role to another” (75).

The text explores the concept of managing emotions in social interactions, emphasizing the role of feeling rules and emotion work. The author illustrates how individuals navigate these rules through emotional exchanges, which she categorizes into straight and improvisational types. Straight exchanges involve adhering strictly to societal expectations without deviation, as exemplified by workplace interactions in which a novice worker shows deference and gratitude to an experienced colleague in exchange for advice. In contrast, improvisational exchanges involve playing with feeling rules, often incorporating humor or irony to manage emotions.

The author refers to the concept of emotional debt, wherein people maintain a mental ledger of feelings owed and received. While most emotional exchanges are unconscious and natural, moments of “inappropriate feeling” can reveal underlying tensions. For instance, a husband might feel underappreciated for his household contributions, which can lead to conflict. This internalized sense of emotional debt emphasizes the complexity of managing feelings in relationships. The chapter further discusses how humor and irony can evolve into cultural customs. The text cites an example in which Korean peasants use smiling masks to respectfully voice grievances to their landlord, which balances adherence to respectful demeanor with the expression of true feelings.

Additionally, the book examines the concept of “paying respects with feeling” (76), detailing various strategies that individuals use to feel what is expected, such as a young woman feigning excitement at her graduation for her parents’ sake. This act of pretending, or emotion work, is a gesture of homage to social norms dictating appropriate emotions. The author also refers to the nonpayment and anti-payment of emotional dues. Nonpayment occurs when individuals refuse to display expected feelings, such as a young woman who doesn’t engage in the excitement at a rock music party. Anti-payment is when a person actively displays opposite feelings, like a young man expressing anger and bitterness during Christmas instead of the expected happiness.

Next, the text emphasizes the importance of emotional exchanges in close relationships, such as marriage, in which individuals not only exchange external favors but also latent emotional support. For example, a wife might offer emotional warmth in exchange for her husband’s steadiness. However, in hierarchical relationships, those with higher status often receive more emotional rewards and deference, while low-status individuals, like servants and women, provide emotional support that becomes normalized as personality traits rather than recognized as part of unequal exchanges.

The author highlights that in private life, individuals can negotiate emotional exchanges and leave unsatisfactory relationships. However, in the public world of work, accepting unequal emotional exchanges is often part of the job. Workers manage their emotions to maintain customer satisfaction, and wages supposedly compensate for the imbalance. The author indicates that in the next section, she will examine what happens when feelings become commodified in the workplace, highlighting the complexities of dealing with emotional expectations in different contexts.